


Champagne Crazy

by scioscribe



Category: Wiseguy
Genre: Exhaustion, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Profitt Arc, recovering from injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:08:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21827971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Mel drags Vinnie out of the hospital for a fun day of errands, bizarre rants, and increasingly more difficult struggles to not pass out.
Relationships: Dan "Lifeguard" Burroughs & Frank McPike & Vinnie Terranova
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Champagne Crazy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



“Wake up.” A hand slapped against Vinnie’s face, light and stinging. “Rome wasn’t built by layabouts who let their enemies keep them flat on their backs.”

“I don’t give a shit about Rome,” Vinnie said. He tried turning away, aiming to bury his face in the thin, antiseptic-smelling hospital pillow, but the hand followed him. “Jesus, did you just twist my ear?”

“Let’s say it was in lieu of your arm.”

“All right, I’m awake. I’m awake.” He blinked a couple times: his eyes felt grainy with exhaustion, and the high-wattage florescent bulbs above the bed seared into them. He’d figured out already that he was talking to Mel—nobody else he knew had that oiled-up sound, like he’d already greased every wheel in the place, and nobody else would’ve come in throwing his weight around that way.

Somehow that still hadn’t prepared him for the sight of Mel shoveling eggs benny into his mouth, eating it out of a steamed-up takeout container.

“The hospital serves eggs benedict?”

“This place? I wouldn’t risk the ptomaine poisoning. No, these are from Avant, about a block away from the hotel. They opened early for me. I have a steak omelet waiting for you in the car. Get up.”

“Mel, I don’t want a steak omelet. I mean, I do, but not enough to get out of bed. The doctors are saying I need another week—”

“Well, doctors. What do they know?”

“Medicine, Mel. They know medicine.”

Mel sat down on the edge of Vinnie’s bed and closed his hand slowly around Vinnie’s ankle. He’d lost the look of the man who spread his money around crowds like he was firing it from a circus cannon; now he was down to just a dark, glittery expression.

“Vince, you work for me.” His voice was mild. “I’m the one paying your hospital bills. And I’m the one—and I don’t say this lightly—who brought you back to life. I tucked that crystal into the palm of your hand, I rested it right between your eyes. I called you back from the abyss.” He let go and sat back, taking another bite of his breakfast. “You can’t tell me your late _mafioso_ had some enlightened attitude toward his employees taking sick leave.”

It was like someone twisting their fingers in the hole the bullet had left in him. He didn’t trust what he’d say just then if he opened his mouth.

“Besides,” Mel said, “I need you today. We’ve got things to do.” He stood up, waving his hand at the garment bag draped over the chair. “Get dressed. That’s brand new Armani in there; consider it a get well present. I’ll wait outside.”

As far as Vinnie could tell, he didn’t have much of a choice here. If he kept trying to dig in his heels, Mel would ice him out completely, and they’d be stuck trying to make charges stick without enough evidence to pin them. Roping in a doctor or some poor nurse would just bring them into Mel’s line of fire. And—hey, it was bearable, wasn’t it? If he’d survived getting shot, he could survive a little bit of early AMA checkout. Even Mel wouldn’t be crazy enough to have him spend the whole day running sprints. And anything short of that, he could probably deal with it.

He felt that way until he started getting dressed, anyhow. God, he was sore—he couldn’t put his shoulders back to slide his arms into the damn Armani jacket without feeling like a sledgehammer was pressing down on his chest. If he ripped any stitches, he could bleed out in the back of Mel’s limo. Maybe the argument that he might wind up ruining the upholstery would be enough to get Mel to let him stay in the hospital for a few more days.

But he didn’t think so. Hell, Mel would just buy a new car.

He did the best he could to spiff himself up before he went out; a guy needed to take a little pride in his appearance. But there was only so much he could do to put a spit-shine on a reflection that told him he didn’t even look like death warmed-over. More like death stuffed in some Tupperware and shoved to the back of the fridge.

He joined Mel, who barely spared him a glance. “Good, you’re up. They’ll give you some paperwork, just sign on the dotted line.”

“That’s fast,” Vinnie said as a cowed-looking nurse passed him a clipboard. He tried to flash her a smile, but she scuttled away from him as soon as he’d given her her pen back. “What, do you own the hospital or something?”

“I could lose an interest like this between the sofa cushions,” Mel said.

He didn’t know how much of Mel he could take when he could barely keep himself upright. Mel could be agreeable sometimes, sure, when the world was piping the right tune to him, when he had the perfect cocktail of drugs running through his veins, when he felt like his tightly twisted little universe with Susan was safe and sound. But even at his most generous, even when he wanted to play Santa Claus handing out gifts, he wasn’t what anybody would call stable. He had to be finessed—life with Mel was one long, fucked-up handjob with everybody else playing the hooker. Maybe Roger could do it in his sleep by now, but Vinnie couldn’t. He was gonna have to spend the whole day wiring his eyelids open so he didn’t slip up.

“Where’s Roger?”

“I needed Roger somewhere else.”

“I just signed out AMA for you, Mel, I don’t get to know where anybody is?”

“All you’re entitled to know is what I want you to know.” He turned a shark-like grin on Vinnie as they cleared the automatic doors. “Cheer up, Vince. Remember that steak omelet. Extra potatoes on the side, hot sauce— _mm_ , I’m surprised you can’t smell it from here.”

***

He’d give Mel this much: the steak omelet was every bit as good as he’d promised. Which only made it even more of a pain in the ass that Vinnie could barely eat any of it.

“It’s getting cold,” Mel said, with a touch of impatience in his voice.

“Some of my insides were on the outside just a couple of days ago,” Vinnie said. “My stomach’s not up to par yet. I was still on soup and pudding back at the hospital.” He read Mel’s expression and speared another bite of fluffy egg, perfectly-seasoned steak, green pepper, tomato, and hot melted cheese. His tongue liked it a lot, even if he had to force himself to swallow it. “But you’re right, it’s delicious.”

Mel relaxed infinitesimally, enough for Vinnie to know he’d played it right. “Good food is a luxury. Like the Armani. It needs to be treated that way. Susan and I grew up on government cheese—that’s actually a real phenomenon, did you know that, Vince? Commodity cheese, and they handed it out in these bricks like it was heroin. Tasted like the inside of someone’s shoe.”

“Yeah, there were always families in the neighborhood having a tough time of it,” Vinnie said. “Everybody knew what it looked like.”

“It’s one thing to know what it looks like and another thing to have to eat it, day in and day out, like a rat. We’re not going to be rats ever again, Vince.”

He was guessing Mel didn’t like being reminded that other people had gone through his troubles without coming out eager to tear everybody else to pieces on their way to the top. He didn’t give a shit about Vinnie’s neighborhood, just like he hadn’t really given a shit about Sonny and what Sonny would have done in his shoes. Mel wanted to think the whole rest of the world felt the same way he did. He’d never grown up, when you looked at it that way; he was like a kid in his dad’s suit.

A kid with billions of dollars, no conscience, and a shitload of unchecked paranoia.

Got it. No rats. He looked for another place to take the conversation. “So what did you want me for?”

“Protection and assistance.”

“I mean specifically.”

“Specifically, I have a lot of people I need to see today, and I don’t intend to be leaving most of them in a good mood. I need you to make sure their displeasure doesn’t translate into bodily harm. And besides that, I get bored running errands on my own.”

“I guess I’m flattered I’m interesting to you.” He was just poking holes in the omelet now, really, watching steam furl out when he took his fork away. His stomach was tightening like a fist around what he’d already eaten. He had a fun day ahead of him: at least choking down half an omelet would give him some fuel so he wouldn’t be running on empty.

Pain flared as he breathed, agony going in and out like a siren.

The car braked gently. Mel put on a pair of sunglasses.

“First stop, Vinnie.”

“First stop out of how many?”

Mel just gave him a repeat of the smile, stepped out of the car, and closed the door behind him.

Vinnie barely held in a groan. He popped the lid back on his takeout container and, lowering the screen between the back and the front of the car, passed it up to the driver. He didn’t recognize this guy, but Mel went through them like a grandma through hard candies.

“Can you toss this for me, buddy?”

“Sure,” the driver said, taking it. His eyes in the rearview mirror were the kind Vinnie had already seen in this business a thousand times: nice enough, but uninvolved and staying that way. “I’ll root for him to give you a lay-down, too—but you know how it is.”

“Yeah,” Vinnie said, sliding out of the car. “I know how it is.”

“Nice of you to join me,” Mel said. “Try to remember you’re on the clock.”

“I got it, all right?”

Mel raised his eyebrows, like he was amused by Vinnie’s testiness. “There’s that primitive fire I’m looking for. Come on.”

It was an office building—nothing but steel and beige paint—not some abandoned warehouse. Plenty of lives got ruined in places that looked like this, but most of the time that ruining didn’t happen via gunfire or a punch to the face, which meant Mel’s pretense of needing him here to play backup was ninety percent bullshit. Maybe there’d be some action later on today, somewhere else, but right now he had the sickening feeling that Mel really had dragged him out of the hospital to play his damn errand boy.

And if he’d had a better head on his shoulders, he would have thought that was pretty good news. His odds of making it through the day were a hell of a lot better if nothing ever came to a boil.

But shit going down could at least take his mind off the pain, which was now settling in for the long haul, locking rusty teeth into his chest and his ribs, playing accompaniment to the roiling nausea from his breakfast. Everything around him kept going gray at the edges while his body flirted with the idea of just passing out then and there.

And all he had to keep him on his feet was Mel Profitt calling in big-deal white-collar debts and talking about zoos:

“You had eighteen months to come up with this,” Mel said. “My arrival here can’t be much of a surprise.”

“You said I could have until the end of the year.” He was a round-faced guy with a crewcut and a thousand dollar suit, and here he was begging Mel for an extension. Vinnie tried to memorize his name—Frank would want it—but the letters on the nameplate seemed to keep wriggling out of shape.

“Oh, so you’re running out the clock, is that it?”

“I’m just asking for the time you gave me, Mel.”

“You know those pandas in the zoo? Their species is dying all around them, dropping like flies over their bamboo, and these little rascals won’t screw without a candlelight dinner and an hour’s worth of foreplay. They could be the last two of their kind on earth for all they know, they’re sure as hell the only two in the San Francisco Zoo or wherever it is, but no, they have to like each other first. That’s not me, Howard, not even close. I don’t have to like a person to do business with them, and when I see the world burning down around me, I don’t sit around waiting for everything to be just perfect before I make my move. Your business is collapsing. Before it’s nothing but rubble, I want what’s owed to me.”

“Mel, I don’t know a panda from a koala—”

“Then when your life falls apart, you can spend your time at the zoo and get a docent to teach you.” Mel snapped his fingers. “Vinnie. Persuade Howard here that he should really comply.”

Like he was up for being muscle right now—or ever too pumped about being used to hammer down a guy who was practically pissing himself with fear. He heaved himself off the wall, feeling the bandage on his chest pull tight; it was like he was getting stretched, spun out like saltwater taffy.

Even Howard saw the kind of shape he was in. “Man, you look like death.”

“He _is_ death,” Mel said.

God, spare him from any more of that bullshit. He just kept his eyes on Howard. “It’s a simple exchange. You give Mel what he’s owed, and we clear out of here and let you get back to business.”

“A failing business,” Mel said.

“I don’t have it,” Howard said quietly. He was only talking to Vinnie now, and Vinnie couldn’t blame him.

“Come up with what you’ve got,” Vinnie said. “Do it by tomorrow. And then we’ll talk about what kind of installment plan will see you through to the end of the year.”

Howard still looked like he just wanted to take shelter under his desk, but he nodded, and Mel led Vinnie out of the building again. Mel didn’t make for the car, though, just leaned up against the stucco wall and picked at his fingernails.

He said, “You’ve got an interestingly soft heart for someone in your line of work, Vince.”

“I’ve got a heart that already did an eighteen month stretch and eyes to tell when an office door is made out of glass. The amount of money tied up in all those suit-and-tie guys walking around in there? They’ve got security cameras in the lobby, no question. If I’d started roughing your pal Howard up, we wouldn’t have made it outside except in handcuffs.”

Mel chuckled. ‘Well. You wouldn’t have, anyway. What was it like?”

“What, prison?”

“I’ve always been curious.”

“Not curious enough to get caught.”

“Not exposed enough,” Mel said. “Give me the whole scoop, Vinnie. Was it like the movies?”

“Damn, your imagination. You’re gonna make me want to go straight home from here to take a shower. How do I know what movies you’ve been watching?” He could have leaned against the wall too, but if he did, he didn’t know that he’d be able to straighten up again. He didn’t want to stand around lightheaded, reminiscing about the good old days in lock-up. “I’m a big guy, Mel. People left me alone.”

“But you weren’t connected back then. Steelgrave came later.”

“Yeah. Sonny was later. Roger must have gone over my resumé with you.”

“A story’s not true until you’ve triple-checked it,” Mel said. “And even then, you shouldn’t bet your life on it.” Which was, Vinnie guessed, the kind of logic that had him hauling his guys out of bed in the middle of the night to comb his yacht for toy bombs.

“Well, you can bet whatever you want on me having done time. I remember every slow second of it.” And right now he’d take being back there, too: at least the pen would’ve still had him in the infirmary. He just wanted to sag down to the ground. He’d take a nap right here in the parking lot.

“So?” Mel said. “Give me all the gory details, then.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Mel. I already told you, people left me alone.”

“But the slow minutes, like you said. The way life stretches on into a gray eternity where all you can contemplate are the walls around you and the smell of pigeon shit.”

“We had a couple of Zane Grey novels, too.”

“You’re a philistine,” Mel said, disgusted. “Get your ass back in the car.”

***

And that was the whole morning, more or less: Mel dragging him places so he could loom in the background. He didn’t know how scary he could possibly look when he was spending the whole time trying not to pass out.

They didn’t take lunch until two o’clock. Vinnie didn’t want to eat—even the hospital’s applesauce and Jell-O would have hit him like a punch to the gut right then—but it was nice to finally get the chance to sit down for longer than it took Mel’s driver to zip them to their next intimidation stop.

“Go ahead,” Mel said, gesturing to the leather-fronted menu. “Anything. Sky’s the limit.”

“What if what I want’s not on the menu?”

“Now that’s the spirit. It’s good to see you enjoying yourself. Sure, throw away the book. Order your saintly mother’s lasagna if that’ll make you happy.”

Vinnie had been ready to say that what he wanted was to go back to his hotel or, better yet, back to the hospital where he’d just have to pray they hadn’t given his bed away—but something about the way Mel said _your_ _saintly mother_ made him hesitate. Mel had whims, after all—it was one of the things that made him so damn dangerous. He had whims, and he liked dangling hooks in front of people after he’d baited them to perfection. If he was bringing up Vinnie’s mother—right when Vinnie had been about to bitch one more time about wanting to call it a day—

He didn’t like the reasons Mel could be thinking about the Terranova family right now.

And if that little name-drop had been meant as a warning, he’d take it.

“Might as well look at my options first,” he said, flipping the menu open.

“Attaboy,” Mel said lightly. “Cautious. I like that in a bodyguard.”

No kidding. He looked up and down the list of entrees, trying to find something that didn’t make his stomach do flips just thinking about it. It’d have to be soup. Consommé—that was broth, right? Just fancy broth. He could do that.

“Consommé,” he said when the server came around. “Thanks.”

“Now, Vinnie, that’s not going to get you back up on your feet. You need something with substance. Lobster bisque at least.”

He couldn’t do anything right then but either sit there or get up and storm out of the restaurant. If he stormed straight out of Mel’s good graces, could Roger get him back in again? Hell, if he _tried_ storming out, would he even make it to the door without falling flat on his face?

Mel yielded, anyway. “Fine, spoilsport. Drop the long face, you can have your consommé. _I’ll_ have the bisque.”

Thank God. The second the server was gone, Vinnie said, “I’m gonna hit the bathroom, all right?”

Mel waved him on, his interest temporarily elsewhere, and God only knew where that was. He did a lot of appealing to God when he was in Mel’s company; Pete would be happy about all this, if the whole thing wound up making a better Catholic out of him.

The bathroom mirror confirmed that as bad as he’d looked this morning, he looked even worse now. He was surprised nobody in the restaurant had pegged him as some kind of zombie. He washed his face, breathing shakily against his hands, pressing cool, wet fingers to his forehead like he was down to literally trying to hold himself together. His eyes burned. He didn’t know how much longer he could do this—hell, he wasn’t sure how he’d been doing it this long. Because it was the job? (Which job, even?) Because he had a bullheaded streak? Because he couldn’t afford too much weakness right now?

Except he couldn’t afford too much strength either. Sonny had liked that Vinnie hadn’t backed down from their little boxing match, but Mel—Mel was different.

Shit, whatever Mel thought about it, if this had gone down in Atlantic City, he’d still be in the nicest hospital room money could buy.

The old rules didn’t apply out in billionaire-land. Mel was maybe shopping around for a country. Ground-level people didn’t mean a damn thing to him unless he could wring some kind of entertainment out of them. Which meant he was trying to wring some out right now. The sooner Vinnie could figure out what he was looking for, the sooner he could give it to him and go to bed. But he had to stay sharp.

Sure. Stay sharp when he felt like his whole body had the consistency of soggy cardboard. Fun day. Real fun.

He splashed some more cold water on his face and, because there was nobody else around, checked his bandages.

He was leaking a little blood. Not enough for it to mean his stitches had gotten ripped, at least, but more than he was comfortable with. Though he couldn’t say he didn’t get a spiteful little thrill out of knowing he’d be ruining the Armani.

In the mirror, he saw his hand drift up to the bandage on his chest.

He could tear the sutures out on his own. It’d get him back to the hospital, anyway.

He could already imagine Frank’s opinion on that one: _What it would get is you killed._

Yeah, good point. But if he was dead, at least he’d be lying down.

He ducked out of the bathroom and found a bay of payphones back near the kitchen. It was a classy establishment, lobster bisque and all, so two out of the three even had their little phone books still on their steel cords. He’d just picked one phone up off the hook when he spotted Mel gesturing at him.

What was he going to say, that he ignored a come-hither from the boss because he had to call his uncle? He let the receiver slip back down and returned to their table.

“Who were you going to call, anyway?” Mel said.

“My bank, to check the balance.”

Mel raised his eyebrows. “You’re worried I don’t pay you enough?”

“More like worried my rent check back home didn’t go through. Mailing from Canada to the US, I don’t know, I don’t trust it. I always get antsy dealing with the post office anyway.” He forced down a spoonful of consommé.

“I’ll remember that,” Mel said, “if I ever need to send you a birthday card.”

He was relaxed for once—he’d hit one of those rare calm spells of his—and Vinnie didn’t want to do anything to shake him out of it. He just kept gritting his teeth and drinking his way through his lunch. “What you ought to do is buy Hallmark.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it,” Mel said. “Except I’m betting on war, Vince, on the inevitable destruction of societies that at their peak capacity. The greeting card industry is one pervasive gilding of the lily someone’s planted to cover up the stench of rot. Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Secretary’s Day. That’s not happiness. It’s not even the satisfaction of oblivion. It’s cheap bullshit peddled out of grocery stores to John and Jane on the street, because little John and Jane are the only people dumb enough to buy it.”

Then he went off on a flurry of Malthus, which at least meant all Vinnie had to do was keep scraping his spoon around in his bowl and nod sometimes. He felt a little dampness through his shirt where the blood was starting to soak through.

***

Going with the consommé had been the right choice, he knew that, but as the afternoon wore on, he started to feel like he might have been better off ordering a cheeseburger for the energy and then reopening his surgical incision just for the break. Mel dragged him around all over town, and the half a bowl of clear fucking broth he’d managed to keep down wasn’t doing much for him. By eight o’clock, he was so woozy it felt like he was tugging his body’s strings from way down in some black pit. Every muscle he had felt like it’d been pummeled by a meat tenderizer, and a shovel blade was pressing down into his chest every time he even took a breath.

But at this point, at least he’d finally worked out why he hadn’t just keeled over. It wasn’t the job or stubbornness or some idea that he had to play Mel just the right way to see all this through.

It was pure dumb survival instinct. He had to keep moving because he didn’t trust what would happen if he stopped.

“I’m meeting Susan here for dinner. She’ll have Roger with her for protection, so we won’t need you.” Mel said those last words with a kind of dismissive little whip-crack, like Vinnie even cared at this point whether he was needed or not. “You can take a cab back to the hotel.”

So all of a sudden, just like that, after a whole day of being Mel’s bodyguard-slash-chew-toy, he was dropped on the sidewalk. He didn’t know what it was Mel had wanted out of him today and he didn’t know whether or not Mel had gotten it.

He hailed a cab and gave the lady driving it an address he didn’t even realize was wrong until five minutes after he’d said it. The driver looked a little like his mother, funnily enough, and maybe it had made him want something more than he’d get back in his suite, no matter how good the mini-bar was.

So he washed up at a place that still made its bucks advertising that it had air conditioning and basic cable. He made a call from the lobby.

“Uncle Mike,” he said. He could hear how bleary his voice sounded, but he couldn’t do anything about it; his mind felt about as clear as smudged-up glass. “I don’t have a newspaper.”

“You had me worried, kid,” the Lifeguard said, and just that one damn sentence, just hearing the guy’s voice over the line, made him want to collapse right then and there. “Frank and I went by your room earlier and got a nasty little surprise when you weren’t in it.”

He felt drained of anything to say, like he was all out of reasons. “I’m at Frank’s hotel—maybe it’s your hotel too, I don’t know. I need a place, man.” He rubbed at his eyes.

“I’m a few blocks north of you,” the Lifeguard said calmly. “Frank’s in room 712. Go right up, Vinnie, and I’ll be over there before you know it, okay?”

Two babysitters. Some OCB prince he was. He lurched into he elevator. There was a roaring in his ears, drowning out all the little hums of people talking around him. His chest felt warm and wet, but the buttoned-up jacket was covering him; if he looked bad, hell, this was a big city, same as New York. Canadians weren’t so polite that they’d go around falling all over themselves to get involved in somebody else’s troubles.

He blinked and found he was staring at cheap numbers in metallic-looking plastic. 712.

Vinnie knocked.

He hadn’t even realized he’d been bracing himself against the door, not until it opened so fast he almost fell into the room.

“Vinnie, what the hell—”

He slumped further, and somehow it clicked that Frank was holding him up: he was sagging against Frank like a bad dance partner.

“All right,” Frank said, maneuvering him around until all of a sudden he was flat on his back on the bed. “It’s okay, Vinnie.”

All the lights in his head were dimming down to just about nothing. He could feel Frank unbuttoning his jacket and then his shirt; he heard Frank make a little noise in the back of his throat then, sharp and guttural, like a twig snapping.

“I knew I didn’t have a high opinion of Profitt,” Frank said, his voice tight, “but after this stunt—the amount of vicarious delight I’ll have bringing this guy in—”

The tide was pulling Vinnie in and out, only letting him catch about one sentence out of every three. What he couldn’t miss was how carefully Frank was handling him as he peeled off the surgical tape and went about patching him up. But Frank was like that when you got to know him: the poster boy for all bark and no bite.

The next thing he knew, the room was dark except for a lamp in the corner and the fluttering light off the TV. Someone had pulled a blanket up over him and taken his shoes off.

Frank and the Lifeguard were at the table, a deck of cards between them. Vinnie squinted at what he could see of the game.

“Are you two playing gin rummy?” His voice was a rusty croak. “I should be embarrassed to be in the same room with you.”

“Good to see you still have your sense of humor,” the Lifeguard said. He wrapped one hand around the edge of the table and used it and his cane to lever himself up; his gait was just stiff enough that Vinnie noticed the prosthetic legs he’d missed back in the hospital. The Lifeguard's face, though—that was one hundred percent familiar, and maybe he would have known it anywhere. The guy was blessed with exactly the right look for his voice.

Frank came over too, looking gray-faced and rumpled. “Why the hell did Profitt take you out of the hospital?”

“I don’t know, Frank. As far as I could tell, he was bored and lonely and wanted to rub in that he still had a collar on me.”

“Frank’s been racking his brain trying to figure out how to charge this particular stunt,” the Lifeguard said.

Frank’s lips thinned, but he didn’t deny it.

“That’s sweet,” Vinnie said. “You two sitting around dreaming up ways to defend my honor.”

“Your honor takes enough of a kicking as it is,” Frank said. “There’s no earthly reason for Profitt to run you into the ground like this.”

“He’s nuts, Frank. And he’s rich, which is a bad combination, you know, it's like how you get the world's shittiest hangovers from champagne. How long have I been out?”

“Not long enough, so you can stop trying to sit up. There’s no way we can’t cook up a good excuse for you spending the whole night AWOL—for all anybody else knows, you found yourself a high-class escort with graduate-level medical training and made a night of it. Hell, maybe it’ll even cheer him up for you to live down to his expectations for once, and picking up a girl is exactly the kind of thing he’d imagine for the guy you’re supposed to be.”

“The guy I’m supposed to be.” Half the time he didn’t even know who that was—his whole life was about trying to find the gray area between the guy the mark wanted and the guy whose skin he could stand to live in.

With Mel, he’d been playing the same back-and-forth between whipped and ballsy for long now that he didn’t remember what he really felt. He sure hadn’t known it when Mel was interrupting his damn speeches just to try to force-feed him and grill him about whether or not he’d gotten roughed up or even raped in prison.

“Hey,” the Lifeguard said. He squeezed Vinnie’s arm. “Whatever it is that’s eating you, you can let it go.”

“No, I can’t.”

“You can for a night,” Frank said. He didn’t sound like he was going to brook any argument on that one. “You’re tucked away where Mel Profitt’s never gonna find you, Vinnie—square in the budget of what OCB’s willing to spring for, with two guys who sit around playing gin rummy and watching whatever the hell it is that’s on the TV right now.”

“ _Night Court_ ,” the Lifeguard said. “I like Larroquette.”

“You could have been back in fighting shape in another week, and instead, Profitt decided to set your recovery back at least twice that.”

“Yeah, trust me, I thought about that. You’re not helping.”

“I know.” Frank pinched the bridge of his nose. “I know it’s not on you, Vinnie. I just don’t want to have to see you like that again. And your Uncle Mike probably ought to get back to the hardware store one of these days, but hell if he’ll go until he’s sure you’re all right. And—I don’t know. Just get some sleep. You need it, and I like knowing where you are for once.”

He couldn’t work up the right answer to any of that. _Thanks_ didn’t even seem to cover it.

_Yeah, I like knowing where I am for once too. And who I’m with—down to the bone, who I’m with._

He half-closed his eyes. “Playing rummy,” he said, knowing his voice still had that croaky sound to it that was probably giving him away. But these were two of the only people where that didn’t matter at all. “It’s almost as bad as Old Maid. Bet you both probably buy cards for people, too.”

“When I remember to,” Frank said.

“That’s a whole theory of Mel’s.” He let his eyes fall down the rest of the way. “When this is all over, I’m gonna have to make sure you two know how to play a real game of poker.”

“Vinnie,” Frank said blandly, “you don’t have what it takes to sit at a poker table with me. But fine, we’ll take a rain check on that.”

“We’ll make a night out of it,” the Lifeguard said. He squeezed Vinnie’s arm one more time.

The light from the TV stuttered against him, red and blue and black. He felt almost like he was floating, but steady all the same, like a boat tugged into harbor. It was good to think about the poker game being there waiting for him. Something to look forward to.


End file.
